Owning Bitcoin is always a rollercoaster ride of emotion and monetary loss, but this morning was particularly bad. Everyone’s favorite cryptocurrency started the day at $1,150 per Bitcoin, before dropping to a low of $887.47 by noon. At one point, people were selling so fast that the currency lost $200 in value in a single hour.

According to sources reached by CoinDesk, the price drop wasn’t the result of a few large players making moves or the fault of one particular exchange, as has happened in the past. Compared to the big price fluctuations a few years ago, the volume of Bitcoin being traded is far higher these days — 37 times higher than in 2013, according to Chinese bitcoin exchange Huobi.
That would indicate that the price fluctuations are an underlying feature of Bitcoin, rather than a teething problem. Price fluctuations have been Bitcoin’s biggest problem in making it mainstream: no retailer really wants to take payment in Bitcoin when the price can fluctuate by double digits in a single hour. It also puts off serious long-term investors, given the potential for an investment to be decimated in such a short space of time.
Despite the problems, however, Bitcoin has been having a good few months. The price of a single coin has been above $1,000 for weeks, matching the previous all-time highs in the early heyday of Bitcoin.

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So how does a guy actually make bitcoins? Do I have to build a super fast computer to mine them?

According to the various calculators out there, I think I would lose ~$150/year if I dedicated my RX480 graphics card to bitcoin mining...

My understanding is that you can invest in warehouses upon warehouses of servers (as JDLM suggests), or you can join a pool with other people and their rigs, and everybody splits the money based on individual contribution.

Digital currencies like Bitcoin are very hot right now, and hackers are apparently looking to take advantage of that, as one of the largest Bitcoin exchanges in the world was just hacked.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies surged in the past few months, which explains why people with malicious intentions would be looking to steal this precious virtual coin.
According to Yonhap News, hackers hit Bithumb, compromising 30,000 accounts. That represents 3% of the exchange’s customers. It’s unclear how much money, if any, was stolen, but some people said they lost money in the attack.
Bithumb realized last week that one of its employees’ home personal computers was hacked. That’s how the hackers may have stolen customer data. But that data does not include passwords, and the company said that digital wallets that contain Bitcoin and other coins were not emptied.
On any given day, Bithumb is the world’s third or fourth exchanges in the world by cryptocurrency trade volume, Business Insider explains.
A BraveNewCoin report says that Bithumb owns more than 75% of the South Korean Bitcoin market volume, and the exchange hosts 10% of the global Bitcoin trade. The same story notes that some 100 customers may have lost hundreds of millions of won, with one person having lost 1.2 billion won after the hack. To put things in perspective, 1 billion won is the equivalent of $870,000. Or nearly 340 Bitcoin at current prices — 1 Bitcoin costs $2,561.14 as of this moment.
Affected customers have already filed a complaint with the National Police Agency’s cybercrime report center.